Regime Change in Hungary: Black Box’s Documentary Films 1988-2006 Now Open to the Public

The Open Society Archives proudly presents the on-line catalog of all the documentary films of Fekete Doboz Alapítvány (Black Box Foundation).

Black Box was established in 1988, as the first independent media group in Communist Hungary. (Find the full story – in Hungarian language – here). Since then, Black Box has both participated in and documented Hungarian politics and cultural events in a way fundamentally different from the state–controlled media’s. Black Box gave voice and a face to those deprived of media visibility: those who dared to print samizdat, those who commemorated the 1956 Revolution, those who organized protests against the communist dictatorship, and those who demanded social and political change and advocated for national sovereignty before the regime change in 1990.

Using the leading, accessible video format from the time, VHS and S-VHS, Black Box chronicled the events that took place in private flats, underground venues, bars, cinemas, theatres and finally in the streets. The video documentation created between 1988 and 1996 is the largest and most significant private regime change video archive in Hungary, and is now available at OSA. Using their own raw footage, Black Box’s edited documentary films were published as alternative news in the form of “video journals” which were then broadcast on the newly set up local cable network television channels in Hungary.

The film presents the commemoration ceremony of the 1956 revolution and Imre Nagy inaugurating a memorial designed by László Rajk in the Père Lachaise cemetery, Paris on June, 1988, and the commemoration turned into an anti-dictatorship demonstration in Budapest on the same day. It is based on reports and interviews with 1956 revolutionaries, relatives of those executed for their involvement in the revolution as well as political opposition figures.